The symbiotic theatre: an evolutionary view of what's inside our heads apart from brain.
With apologies to Wole Soyinka

Thursday, April 18, 2013

The neural substrate; astrocytes and information theory

How the brain was in 1911 - Encyclopaedia Britannica

I left concept and demon as a Mobius
strip.That way is disaster.

Salvation may lie, I suspect, sethren,
in information theory and astrocytes.About which I know, to be honest with you, fuck all. Cells in
the brain, glial cells. It was thought
that astrocytes merely provided scaffolding and maintenance.I have no idea how numerous they are, but in
the human brain there are about one hundred billion neurons, and astrocytes
outnumber them considerably.Two hundred
billion? Ten thousand billion? A
lot.Also, and this is the significant
bit, they don’t just do structure, maintenance, repair, garbage removal and
vermin zapping.They do
information traffic control the magnitude of which makes me
dizzy.

The sky tilts.Isteady myself with a hand on the cold metal
of the bus stop.No, fine, thank you,
fine.I’m all right. But there's more.While Professor Alcino Silva, from the Brain
Research Institute at UCLA, says, "There is a carefully choreographed
synaptic signalling dance between astrocytes and neurons...", according to
Maiken Nedergaard, "The volume of
human astrocytes is almost 20 fold larger than their rodent counterparts,
enabling human astrocytes to integrate input from a comparably staggering
number of synapses, 2 million compared with 100,000 in the rodent brain."Again, I touch the cold metal, not for
support, but for the steadiness of the world.

So in this dance of the astrocytes and the neurons, we are
talking about numbers of possibilities so astoundingly out of, for sure, my intellectual grasp
that we need not worry about the brain lacking the computational capacity to
handle any hypothesis that my puny workspace may foist on it.That’s my point, sethren.And as a corollary, because the functioning
of this astrocyte/neuron choreography is as yet imperfectly described, it would
be vainglorious to try and ascribe locations and functions just yet.For anybody.

What I am saying, sethren, is that for the purposes of our
endeavour here, it is quite respectable to treat the brain the other side of
the language barrier as a black box; the location of an ideoverse; continuous
with the metaverse and the universe; to build a hypothesis about this black box
being (given its continuity with the universe and the metaverse) the place
where culture evolves, including things like needles and the demon astrocyte;
remind ourselves that, though our venture here is derisory compared with his,
Darwin did in 1857 exactly what I am suggesting now, propound the theory before
he understood its physical basis; and plunge onwards.All we can lose is our dignity, the respect of
the academy, and hours which otherwise might be spent wandering the streets hustling
for any spare change.

As for information theory, I know even less about it than
about the working of the brain, and cannot consult my phone which has been
found by the good workers of the Alhambra Theatre, Bradford, under a seat in
row F, but which I cannot retrieve owing to lack of the wealth now demanded for
a bus ticket.“Fucking thumb a lift, yer
daft git,” yes, sether Albert, a canny suggestion, as The Pitman Painters would
say.

The only thing I do know about information theory is that it is about
economy.Information is what causes a
change of state in a system.Anything
else is noise.I don’t want to knock
language, human speech.As I say, I use
it all the time.But a lot of human
speech is noise, redundancy, ambiguity, sheer nonsense.And, I make this assertion about the black
box, the brain the other side of the language barrier; the neural substrate has little use for
language.Language is merely a
cumbersome, somewhat shapeless and blurry form that demons in their numberless
alliances assume when they journey out of one ideoverse and through the world
to other ideoverses.It is not a
reliable system.Because it is so
overdetermined, it is one of the main places where mutation occurs. Seldom does a demon arrive in exactly the form
that it left.As it transits through ear or eye and emerges on the ideoverse
side of Wernicke’s area, it is likely to be co-opted by a similar demon jealous
of its accommodation, and thus immediately mutated, the one becoming the
other.Such co-option across alliances
of demons we call confirmation bias.A
signal that this mutation has been complete is when someone says, “Yes, I know
exactly what you mean.”

Information theory is the basis for economy, for the
exclusion of noise and redundancy.It
informs, for instance, the cell phone system.I guess the processes of the human neural substrate would not be found wanting
by the prescriptions of information theory.Thus it’s potential becomes orders of magnitude more vertiginous even than it was to start with.

And that doesn’t matter a fuck to demons, sethren, to culture.That’s where they thrive.Culture does not evolve by
making things clear and plain for its obligate symbiont, the human organism.In fact culture is not at all keen on us
knowing it’s there.I sometimes wonder
if it has its own phagocytes, its own glial cells, in their infinite trillions,
to attack, consume and excrete, as noise at the limits of entropy, the kind of
thing I am trying to say here.But this
is paranoia.And as your hunger grows,
sethren, and the wherewithal to pay Madam MeMe for her slurry is harder and
harder to come by, all sucked away by the tapeworms of government and the
financial industry, you will, by way of distraction, begin to cry out, “Stop
your blather, man.Have done with
prevarication.You were in a deep
hole.It suddenly came to you that every
demon is a concept, and every concept a demon.Get th’sel out of that fatal loop if th'can.”

But first I had to set the stage, sethren; though to be
honest for what enaction I know not yet.Tomorrow I shall make the attempt, so we may spend the weekend at peace.

About Me

Old man, still puzzled, amused, horrified by the world. Question struck me, why are human beings, individually so intelligent, collectively so stupid? We have religious, political, factual beliefs that look like certainties. Yet if one lot is right (Yaweh is God, debt is sin) the rest of us are in error. That means most of us are wrong most of the time. How’s that work?
Seems we’re not rational creatures, though one of our special tricks is we can “do” reason. Our big brains are an environment where culture evolves. Survival is the driving force of culture, and a lie can usually survive better than the truth. Culture? Darwinian process in the virtual space where all our brains meet—not mystical, any more than cyberspace. Real, where processes continue. Needs discussion. So I blog about it.
I also have a life. A novel, Bad to the Bone, some plays on. I read, eat, drink a lot. My grandchildren say I swear too much, but what’s just enough? Crazy about mountain and road biking. I talk a bit, my wife says. Love music. The person who I have most admired ever is Wangari Maathai. Brother Jero is just the voice that comes to me when I try to blog about Evoculture.